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Zondor and "The Gang"
Zondor, the most influential and enigmatic denizen of the North Melbourne Bigfooty forum, is a veteran troll and pioneer of the alias account. Since the early 2000s, he has enjoyed the dubious privilege of being the only user allowed to create and sustain aliases with impunity. Though he is a complex character and there are subtle and major differences between each of his accounts, he is known chiefly for a lewd and puerile yet endearing sense of humour. A notable feature of his posts, spanning well over a decade, is the consistent references to gimp masks. Accompanying this enduring fascination with the BDSM facial garment are the paeans to a motley array of abstruse oddities including the following: Half Tonne Mom aka Renee Williams - a morbidly obese woman, said to be the heaviest in the world. Annabel Chong - an Asian-American pornographic actress who once had sex with 251 men in the film The World's Biggest Gang Bang. Cytherea - an American pornographic actress known for her ability to "squirt." Zondor's fascination with the actress was brief, peaking around 2010 after the band Kings of Leon released their hit single Sex on Fire. He would often mention these two phenomena together in a sordid juxtaposition of two of the four classical elements. An often overlooked trait is his curious affinity with the number 69, which refers to a sex position in which two people perform simultaneous oral sex. It is estimated that Zondor incorporates the number into more than 30% of his posts, often gratuitously but sometimes ingeniously. Zondor's influence on the peculiar patois of the North Melbourne board has been unparalleled. His unique command of the English language and his relentless repetition of certain locutions has profoundly and irrevocably shaped the vernacular of the forum. While some of his neologisms are quite rudimentary—the use of YouPorn to denote Youtube—and other phrases have entered into the Bigfooty lexicon through sheer repetition—"I don't think that's very fair"—there are other richer and more complex examples. When a player or coach was apparently underperforming in his role, Zondor inexplicably added the letter "s" to the end of their surname, changing it to the plural form. The most common example of this was Dean Laidleys. Corey Jones, who was declining at the time, consistently failing to keep his feet in contests, posed a conundrum. Another user logically began calling him Corey Jone. Zondor, being a Jones fan and defender, did not immediately adapt to this method of eliding the terminal sibilant. When Aaron Edwards became a target of his criticism, he had no choice but to embrace it. With the recent indifferent form of Leigh Adams and Ben Jacobs, this usage thrives. It is futile to try to explain why this is so funny, but it is. At one point, Zondor started eschewing the provided Bigfooty emoticons. Instead of selecting a suitable emoticon from the post box, he would type a description more accurately expressing his countenance. The following are some of the earliest examples: :Serious Looking Facey Thing :dreaming facey thing :thems the facts facey thing :worried facey thing :serious looking facey thing with stern look The last example was an important step in the evolution of this curiosity; it soon lead to the much celebrated :stern look that is ubiquitous on the forum today. Stern look preceded by a colon is the only form in current usage. No variations have survived. The exclamation "Hear ye, Hear ye!" (alternatively spelled using the homophone, i.e. "Here ye, here ye!") enjoyed a relatively brief but febrile vogue just before the turn of the decade. Zondor did not conform to the traditional usage of the town crier's phrase, which was intended to gain a crowd's attention; instead, he used it for general approbation of another user's post, conflating it with the traditional "Hear, hear!" as an expression used to show emphatic agreement. This was sometimes accompanied by a now-extinct Youtube video of an American adolescent wailing the words in a drunken stupor. In more casual conversation, the variation "I hear ye yah" was acceptable. Zondor has occasionally removed the metaphorical gimp mask and revealed some semblance of a real human being. Like most North Melbourne supporters, he staunchly opposes the relocation of the club. His posts on this topic can be significantly longer than his others, and they are characterised by an idealistic rhetoric and a passionate prose style that normally climaxes with a series of short sentence fragments, leaving the reader in a state of inspired headiness. His observations on football—the ostensible topic of the forum—can be shrewd and informative, but they are quite often proven to be foolish. When he engages in a debate with another poster, though he is capable of the occasional riposte, his argumentative ability is regularly found wanting. One of his favourite tactics is to employ the straw-man fallacy, and when he loses interest in the discussion, his posts can devolve into absurdity: a mocking echo of a turkey, with the imitative words "Gobble, gobble, gobble," is not an uncommon response in his posting history. In his posts, Zondor reveals little about his personal life. Some infrequent comments on the topic of distance running suggest that he has some knowledge of athletics. It is suspected that he is a regular patron of the Melbourne brothel Tender Touch. Zondor is perhaps best known for his creative use of alias accounts. His dedication to these alternate personae is matchless, with some of the accounts active for over ten years. The following are some of his most interesting characters: Devil Fish - Notorious for his terse and implacable pessimism, he is one of Zondor's oldest and most active aliases. Almost all of his posts are made after losses. He fetishises fast, outside players such as Hawthorn's Isaac Smith and Sydney fringe player Gary Rohan, while strong inside midfielders such as Ben Cunnington, Jack Ziebell, and Trent Dumont are anathema to him. "Pace and skill, my friends, pace and skill," is one of his oft repeated mantras. His strong aversion to ruckmen who aren't notably athletic culminated in the infamous equation "Goldstein = Dinosaur." Onip - The most obscure member of the gang, he has been dubbed a "serial non-poster" by Zondor, who has exercised admirable discipline in using the account sparingly: Onip has made just 91 posts in almost ten years. Users normally learn of Onip's antics through second-hand accounts from Zondor. He usually expresses a pro-relocation sentiment and is characterised by a benign obtuseness. Denny_Crane - This was a short-lived but wildly popular alias based on the Boston Legal character. While his posts were largely nondescript, the success of the account can be ascribed to the consistent signing-off of each post with "Denny Crane," much like the character in the television show. An Alan_Shore alias was skillfully handled for a short time by another Bigfooty poster, but as less adept users started to create accounts based on other characters from the show, the fun was put to an end by Bigfooty moderators. __Brainiac__ - Before this account was created, "Brainiac" was an ironic appellation, taken from a comic book character, that Zondor and his aliases used for the former North Melbourne coach and player Dean Laidley. This is one of the very few aliases that ever ventures outside of the North Melbourne board on Bigfooty. __Brainiac__ is best known for his droll phantom drafts posted annually on the Drafts and Trading board. It has been speculated that the double underscore enveloping the username is a nod to another legendary Bigfooty poster. Artichoke - For a long time he did not seem perceptibly different to Zondor, perhaps a more bumbling version. He gradually emerged as a comic genius who made posts that consisted almost entirely of malapropisms, mixed metaphors, and spoonerisms. His posts would invariably have little to do with the thread that they were posted in. Arthur Cloke - Since Artichoke's banning, he has taken on the aforementioned role of making irrelevant posts full of amusing mistakes in language.